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Theodore Roosevelt; an Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt
page 53 of 659 (08%)
be when it was dark, so that our appearance might scandalize no one. On
several occasions we thus swam Rock Creek in the early spring when the
ice was floating thick upon it. If we swam the Potomac, we usually
took off our clothes. I remember one such occasion when the French
Ambassador, Jusserand, who was a member of the Tennis Cabinet, was
along, and, just as we were about to get in to swim, somebody said, "Mr.
Ambassador, Mr. Ambassador, you haven't taken off your gloves," to which
he promptly responded, "I think I will leave them on; we might meet
ladies!"

We liked Rock Creek for these walks because we could do so much
scrambling and climbing along the cliffs; there was almost as much
climbing when we walked down the Potomac to Washington from the Virginia
end of the Chain Bridge. I would occasionally take some big-game friend
from abroad, Selous or St. George Littledale or Captain Radclyffe
or Paul Niedicke, on these walks. Once I invited an entire class of
officers who were attending lectures at the War College to come on one
of these walks; I chose a route which gave us the hardest climbing along
the rocks and the deepest crossings of the creek; and my army friends
enjoyed it hugely--being the right sort, to a man.

On March 1, 1909, three days before leaving the Presidency, various
members of the Tennis Cabinet lunched with me at the White House.
"Tennis Cabinet" was an elastic term, and of course many who ought
to have been at the lunch were, for one reason or another, away from
Washington; but, to make up for this, a goodly number of out-of-town
honorary members, so to speak, were present--for instance, Seth Bullock;
Luther Kelly, better known as Yellowstone Kelly in the days when he was
an army scout against the Sioux; and Abernathy, the wolf-hunter. At the
end of the lunch Seth Bullock suddenly reached forward, swept aside a
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